CRM & Tech for The Small Business

If you have used, or are thinking about using, one of the services that provides for email campaign management for businesses, you have likely heard about Swiftpage Email or Constant Contact.

For those of you who have not jumped into these waters yet, let me provide a little background as to what these solutions (generally) offer. 

If you have ever attempted to send a blast of more than a few dozen emails from your desktop, you know that the process is typically fraught with challenges, not the least of which is that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) likely limits the number of email sends allowed from your account/domain.  (They do not want their IP addresses to be associated with spamming activities.) 

Performance on your desktop machine can also be a major concern.  Further still, even if you can overcome these challenges, the largest hurdle to effective campaign management remains:  no visibility into the results of the blast – i.e. – who opened the message and how many times, what links did they click, who did they forward to, etc.

Enter campaign management tools.  These solutions typically offer the following components in the effort to tame the email blast beast:

• Emails are sent from the service providers servers, not your own.  This avoids the ISP filtering and spam issues.  It also sidesteps the performance issue – your desktop and/or server is not tied up chugging through processing 500 emails announcing your latest multi-lingual widget.
• HTML template support- including libraries of ‘ready-to-roll’ templates and online tools for editing and adding your content to them.  Better solutions also allow you to import templates you have created in HTML editors such as Microsoft Expression Web or Dreamweaver.  HTML email templates are important since not only do they allow you to send dynamic looking emails, they allow for tracking what happens with the email after you send it.
• Reports and analysis on the blast.  This is as important as making sure the emails reach their destination.  Typical statistics include summaries and details for bounced emails, opt outs, opens, clicks, and forwards.
• CAN-SPAM compliance.  Another critical piece of this process is making sure you are in compliance with anti-spamming laws.  The campaign management providers make this process transparent so that with every blast you send, you are complying with regulations and thus not exposing yourself to potential fines and the like.  This includes keeping a permanent record of all opt-outs associated with your account such that even in the event you accidentally include an address that has opted-out previously, their servers will not send to that address.  Protecting you from yourself – good deal!

From here this is where the various services begin to diverge in the services offered.

Advanced services and tools that are available – some at additional cost, some inclusive with all of the providers plans – include:

• Direct integration with your customer and contact management database.
• The ability to send and manage online surveys.
• The ability to ‘write-back’ to your CRM system the results of a blast, thereby generating so-called ‘hot-lists’ for phone follow up.
• Automation of multi-step campaigns such that you schedule one email today, another with a follow up template 4 days from now, and a third in 10 days.  Depending upon your needs, some solutions will even branch next steps differently depending upon the recipient’s behavior (“If they open, send this as follow up, if they do not open, then send this one…)

Swiftpage and Constant Contact will be the primary focus of part two of this entry and we will drill into some specifics about how the services work and interact with Act! by Sage.

M Scott Schaffernoth, ACC, SLXCE/DEV7.5
www.winnovative.com
mscott@winnovative.com